jquery getJSON() response empty from cakephp controller, but 200 success

I can pass my errors from standard http://, but I cannot get the $errors values to render (or even pass) in my jquery call. Anyone know what I am doing wrong here? I've been at this for about 5 hours and falling asleep on my face.. Thanks for any guidance and critique.

My jQuery:

$j("#applicant_age").focusin(function(){
    $j(this).css("background-color","#FFFFCC");
  });
  $j("#applicant_age").focusout(function(){
    $j(this).css("background-color","#ffffff");
    $j.getJSON('<?php echo $this->Html->url(array('controller'=>'plans', 'action'=>'ajax_search_validate'))?>', function(json){
    });
  });

Controller Action:

function ajax_search_validate() {
    if ($this->Plan->validates()) {
        $this->Plan->set($this->data);
        $errors = $this->Plan->invalidFields();
        $this->set('errors', $errors);
    }
}

View (probably pointless to post this but what the hey...):

<?php
foreach ($errors as $error) :
?>

<p id="errorStyle" style="padding: 10px; background-color: #FF3333; color: #ffffff; margin:     0px 0px 10px 0px; "><?php echo $error; ?></p>

<?php endforeach; ?>

FireBug response:

ResponseHeaders
Date    Wed, 18 May 2011 09:28:51 GMT
X-Powered-By    PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny10
P3P CP="N..."
Connection  K开发者_运维技巧eep-Alive
Content-Length  0
Server  Apache/2.2.9 .....
Content-Type    text/html
Keep-Alive  timeout=15, max=100
RequestHeaders
Accept  application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest

---

The view you are rendering is HTML, so your $.getJSON call is fetching a bunch of HTML, and not JSON. The response will appear empty if the JSON does not validate, which is why you are seeing nothing returned in your $.getJSON call (despite the 200 success response). Try this:

$j.get('<?php echo $this->Html->url(array('controller'=>'plans', 'action'=>'ajax_search_validate'))?>', function(html){
    alert(html);
});

If you really do want JSON to be returned to the client, you will need to modify your controller to return some. Something like:

echo json_encode(array('errors', $errors));

You will probably have to disable the default view rendering behaviour (or create a JSON view). I am not familiar with CakePHP so I can't really go into the details as to how that can be achieved.